Learning Outside The Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools for Academic Success and Educational Revolution

A Naked Introduction

The day we turned in the final draft of this book, we were supposed to run naked in midafternoon through the main campus of Brown University. (Alas, for the sake of our egos the run had to wait for the spring. It was damn cold that February morning!) We were seniors, less than six months away from graduation. The naked run was to be the consummation of a contract between two kids who had been told they would be failures their entire lives. We made the deal for the naked run during our first semester as recent transfers to Brown (Jon from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and David from Landmark College, a two-year college in Putney, Vermont). We promised each other we would do the run when the book was done.

The contract was always presumed to be a joke. We were committed to writing a book, but neither one of us really believed we would ever see it in glorious black and white. You see, we were never supposed to become Ivy League students. Jon, diagnosed with dyslexia in fourth grade, was supposed to be a soccer player; if an injury ended his career, Jon would, at best, turn to coaching. Dave, diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in second grade, was a high school dropout and drug addict and was supposed to become . . . well, a high school dropout and a drug addict.

We were supposed to be a pair of statistics, not Ivy League college students, and definitely not coauthors. But when we met in the fall of 1997 at transfer orientation, we began a friendship that would ultimately give birth to this book. In our first semester at Brown, we explored our histories and our wounds from growing up in a cruel educational system that told us at an early age we were lazy, stupid, and crazy. During this time, we came to know that we were members of the LD (learning disabled)/ADHD community, a population that faces brutal oppression in our schools. After arriving at Brown (proving all the experts wrong), we came to learn that we are not inherently defective and that our stories were not the narrative of some cognitive lepers but rather case studies in a much broader struggle that consumes all of us. Our life struggles had more to do with freeing ourselves from the institution of education than transcending our own personal weakness.

We are all immersed at a young age in a vast socializing institution of education that demands emotional and intellectual sacrifices. It is a loss the very first time we sit at a desk and are told that spelling is what it means to be smart, and sitting still, rather than having compassion for others, becomes what it means to be a good kid. It is a loss and a crime when creativity, alternative learning skills, and an individualized education take a back seat to rote memorization, standardized testing, and the misconception that all people learn the same way. In the end, we all suffer when our report card and gold stars become a reflection of who we are, become all that we are.

But the greatest lesson of our journey is that we are not tethered to the past; we can change our lives and use our education to free ourselves. At some point (at Brown/before Brown; no one can really pin down when the change happened), we got sick of all the different ways people tried to define us and we said, Screw it. We began a mission to define ourselves for ourselves, to empower ourselves, and to use our higher education to heal old wounds, shake off old identities, and recover the lost parts of ourselves. How did we do this? You do not have to have a Ph.D to understand our approach. We stopped allowing the institution of education to define us. We took control of our education by embracing our cognitive differences, embracing the alternative ways we learn, and not feeling ashamed of ourselves anymore.

By the end of our first semester at Brown, realizing that we were not lazy and stupid, as we had been labeled for years, and knowing that so many others, LD/ADHD or not, suffer similar oppression, we realized the value in sharing our stories. We all deserve an education that gives us that experience of mastery, freedom, and empowerment. And so we set out to do the only thing more absurd than a high school dropout and a teenage illiterate meeting together at an Ivy League university: writing a book.

At that time, the prospect of a naked run on the green was the only thing that could possibly top the absurdity of our lives. And naked or not, we are now running circles around the Ivy Tower, mocking it, embracing it, using it, learning from it, and in the end, challenging this institution as we always have.

What you have in your hands is the guide we wished we had when we began our journey. Education is one of the most beautiful and liberating things we can pursue in our lives, but too often it is approached as a restrictive, punitive, linear, and moralistic act. On our journey, there were no study guides that embraced alternative learning styles, no signposts that led to personal empowerment, and no avenues for an individualized education. We needed an unconventional approach that respected our differences and our individual goals. We were forced to create this approach for ourselves because we couldn’t find it anywhere else.

With this new approach in hand, we could then go back and truly take advantage of our education, specifically our higher education. College was a better environment for us than high school. Although it does have its limitations (we’ll get to those in the last chapters of the book), higher education can be a learner-centered and self-directed environment, if you choose to engage with it as such. And the university is an environment that holds personal empowerment as one of its highest values.

Unlike high school, middle school, and certainly elementary school, college is truly about self-directed development and learning—ironically much more like preschool. In this environment we are expected to explore our values and, as adults, explore ideas from multiple perspectives, ultimately developing our own values and perspectives, moving away from rote memorization and regurgitation. College is also more accommodating to and inclusive of alternative learning styles. The academic accommodations to our different learning styles in college left much to be desired, but they were far superior to the vast majority of services provided at public high schools across the country.

This handbook comes straight from the trenches to help you find academic success and personal empowerment, and give you the tools to revolutionize your education. The core of this book is a radical approach to the institution of education that has such a stranglehold on young minds. Learning Outside the Lines takes a self-directed approach to education that allows you to chart your own path, set your own goals, and define your own markers for success, as opposed to jumping through someone else’s hoops. This is a tool to be used by you whether you are LD/ADHD and fighting against an oppressive pathology; a fourteen-year-old facing the halls of conformity called high school; a seventeen-year-old facing an educational future that you fear is out of your control; or a college student who is sick of running the rat race, spinning your wheels. And finally, this handbook is for you if you left school, nauseated by the shame our education deals out in droves, but are considering coming back to improve your future; or if you don’t know what you want to do, but you want to change.

In the end, this book is for all of us who have faced the difficulties of a narrow-minded education system, were handed restrictive template identities, lost part of our self, and now want to change our past to chart a new life course. The goal of this book is to help you use your education as a way to transcend your past, find academic success, and rediscover the part of your self that the institution of education stole from you.

Academic Success

This book pushes the envelope of what academic success means. Unlike every other guide to school, we deemphasize grades as the meaning of academic success. A 4.0 grade point average is not the end-all and be-all of our education. Rather, academic success means defining intellectual, personal, and social goals and using the medium of higher education to achieve whatever you want to be. However, if the honor roll is your goal, using this guide will improve your grades. Academic success may mean good grades for you, or it may mean simply passing your class. This book will allow you to achieve your goals for your education.

Personal Empowerment

The core value of the book is that your education is a time to be empowered—to gain skills, perspectives, and experiences that will shape your future in a positive way. We explore how you can use your education as a means to redefine yourself or pursue an identity that is an honest reflection of who you are. When you do this, you free yourself from your past and from having to be what now defines you, and you open up your future—the essence of what it means to be empowered.

Educational Revolution

Educational revolution is the ultimate outcome of pursuing an education that is about personal empowerment. Using your education to become who you want to be, to learn in a way that is appropriate for your mind, stands in direct opposition to many of the oppressive values that constitute our education. Being revolutionary with your education is not hard. All you have to do is use our handbook, learn in a way that suits your mind, and follow your heart, and you are engaging in a revolutionary process.

The Goods

This book is not a theoretical, academic textbook that stands detached from reality or pontificates about theories of learning. Nor does it have a goal in mind for you other than your finding success as you define it. We do not impose an idealized notion of success and learning on you. Rather, the contents of this book are tools for you to use in pursuit of your goals. The biggest tools of the bunch are our study skills chapters. However, for us personal empowerment and academic success came as much from internal change as they did from sound study skills.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

Part I, Deviant Minds, explores our personal change, presenting our life journey in two personal narratives. It concludes with Chapter 3, Institutionalized, which looks critically at the institution of education and explores concrete ways to look inward to chart our own educational path.

In Part II, Schooled, we get down to the tools that will enable you to find academic success. These are the alternative study skills—the kind that are on the blacklists of teachers. Congruent with the themes of our book, the study skills are alternatives to the types of skills that assume everyone learns the same way. They are tools for revolution. All of our study skills are meant to be individualized, bringing education to the student as the student is. Our skills are about beating a system that is oppressive and unjust. And the best part of it all is that the study skills are simply good learning. They embrace all kinds of minds and access all types of alternative learning styles. Using these tools, you will learn better, get better grades, and revolutionize your education.

In Part III, Beyond Beating the System, we explore the ultimate goals of learning outside the lines. By beating the system, taking control of your education, and redefining yourself, we explore how to create experiences that embrace the parts of ourselves that are left unrealized by traditional education. We explore concrete ways to take back the self from the institution of education and how to find new learning environments—all in an effort to live a life that is truly less ordinary.

Our lives have been anything but a linear, logical progression, moving through socially constructed markers of development. This book represents the whole picture of our journey. Although most self-help books assume a sequential development, no one lives that way. You will find throughout this book the themes, skills, and processes that we discovered almost by accident throughout our lives, tangled up with academic success, academic failure, and a whole bunch of other things—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

If at any point you find that what you are reading is irrelevant to your life, jump around, skip sections, burn part of this book if you like. This book is your tool. By using it on your terms and for your own reasons you are living its fundamental premise: that this is your education, and no one else’s.

So go forth on your own path.

Part I: Deviant Minds

1: Jonathan

I met Leo the Late Bloomer—a lion from a children’s book—the morning of my second day of third grade. My mother bought Leo on my first day of third grade when, standing in front of Pennycamp Elementary School in Manhattan Beach, California, I turned to her and asked calmly, Why am I stupid? I can’t read; all the other kids can read. What’s wrong with me? I must have broken her heart standing in front of the third-grade classroom. In just a short time, I had gone from being an energetic joyful child to a depressed little man.

At home, I was the glue and the joy for the tensions of a blended family that consisted of my mother, father, half-sisters, and half-brother. Throughout my childhood, our house was filled with passion and always with the humor and the spirit of people who never fit in and fought at all costs to succeed. I grew up there, and although I would leave with my own share of wounds, my family would eventually save my life. They loved me, an eccentric child with red hair and cowboy boots. Like everyone else in my family, I had a foul mouth and was afraid of no one.

Leo couldn’t do anything right, my mother read to me the morning after I asked her why I was stupid. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t write. I sat in her bed, my head in her lap, listening to her read. It was so familiar. Throughout my entire life, she had read to me about animals that never quite fit in: Ferdinand the Bull, Frederick the Mouse, Curious George, and Paddington the Bear. She continued to read, "He couldn’t draw. He was a sloppy eater, and he never said a word. ‘What’s the matter with Leo?’ asked Leo’s father. ‘Nothing,’ said Leo’s mother. ‘Leo is just a late bloomer.’"

Born into an Irish working-class family, my mother was bright and very likely had undiagnosed dyslexia. Having struggled with school her whole life, she saw the similarities between my schooling and what she had gone through. In her mind school was about conformity, discipline, and power.

‘Better late than never,’ thought Leo’s father. Every day Leo’s father watched him for signs of blooming. . . . ‘Are you sure Leo’s a bloomer?’ asked his father. ‘Patience,’ said Leo’s mother. ‘A watched bloomer doesn’t bloom.’

My dad was on the other side of the family divide. He was the valedictorian at Holy Cross College, and after getting a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Chicago, he received a law degree from Georgetown, where he was selected to the Law Review. He loved me more than anything he had ever loved in his life. But when I hid in the bathroom, afraid to make the morning ride to school, or when I stumbled over words and could not learn to spell my name, I believed he was ashamed of me. I felt as if I needed to work harder, to be smarter for him to love me.

So Leo’s father watched television instead of Leo. The snow came. Leo’s father wasn’t watching. But Leo still wasn’t blooming. The trees budded. Leo’s father wasn’t watching. But Leo still wasn’t blooming. Then one day, in his own good time, Leo bloomed.

When my mother hit this point in the story, she always smiled, and I smiled too, but I also turned to her and said, Leo would have been fucked if he was ever in Mrs. C’s class.

Mrs. C, a graying and slightly balding woman in her mid-forties, was my second-grade teacher, who taught me to be ashamed of myself. In her class, school was no longer a safe place about playing with blocks and working with other kids, things that I was good at. In first grade, I could not remember the months of the year or the days of the week to save my life. But my teacher told me that I was okay, that kids learn at their own pace, and she let me play with blocks. Mrs. C did not believe in that. The first day of second grade I was greeted with a desk and was told that I had to sit there the entire day. There was no play time, only a twenty-minute recess. For me, every day of second grade was a series of painful tasks to endure. I couldn’t tell time, I couldn’t spell, and reading was the most traumatic of all.

I was in the blue jay reading circle, reading, See Spot run, most days. I knew what kind of reading group I was in. My circle met on the right side of the classroom, all the way across the room from my desk. Gathering my books like all the other kids, we methodically moved to our different circles: the robins, the hawks, the sparrows, and the blue jays. Our paths would cross only slightly, but I could see the books getting thicker in each group. One girl, Jenny, laughed at me almost every day and said, I read that book last year. In our circle I didn’t talk, and looking at the pages made my head hurt and made me feel dizzy.

During reading I was so angry and ashamed I could taste my stomach acid come up into my throat and seep behind my nostrils any time I burped. I used to imagine killing the teacher. Mrs. C talked to the kids in the higher reading group differently than she talked to me. Her body language told them that they were good, they were smart, and it told me that I was stupid. In my reading group each time I attempted to unscramble the words that floated around in my head, I tried to tell Mrs. C to let me stop. I couldn’t breathe. I felt trapped. I was trying so hard and wanted desperately to be like everyone else. I learned that year to hide in the bathroom to escape reading out loud. In the bathroom, I would stare at the mirror, hoping to God that no one walked in on me crying. But it only worked sometimes. Mrs. C often stopped the lesson until I got back from the bathroom. When I returned, I could feel everyone staring at me.

I knew how important school was to my whole family. My father was smart; my brother, Billy, had already left for college. My sister Michelle would go two years after him, and everyone knew that Kelly had tested genius as a kid. But Kelly and I had something in common. When I was in second grade, Kelly was depressed and missed almost half of her senior year of high school. We would hang out in the mornings, and she talked to me much like my mom did—about how school was intellectually and emotionally restrictive. She was an actress and a source of creativity in my life. But she would still go to college and get good grades. I didn’t think I could do that. I thought I was stupid. At night, my parents argued about my school and about how much my mother should help me and how much of the work I should have to do. I sat outside their bedroom, and listened and heard the anger and pain in my dad’s voice. I wanted my dad to be proud of me and to love me, but I didn’t know what I could do to make him think I was smart.

About once a week I waited outside my second-grade classroom and listened to my mom argue with Mrs. C: You are destroying this kid. Look at him. He doesn’t shower. He doesn’t talk. He has been diagnosed with depression. He’s only seven. Every time you terrorize him with those goddamn spelling words, he wants to kill himself. I worked for three hours a night on my spelling that year, only to fail every test. Kids have to learn how to spell. Those are the rules. There are no exceptions, Mrs. Mooney. So my mother created the exceptions: mental health days. Anytime I had a spelling test or I didn’t want to go to school, I didn’t. Screw Mrs. C and her stupid spelling tests. We’re going to the zoo. Mental health days were one of the few bright spots in my life, when the pain stopped for a while. My mom and I just watched the animals and bought popcorn. Even as the afternoons would end and I would start to rub my eyebrow because I was so scared to go back the next day, my mom would say, Fuck Mrs. C and her spelling test. You are smart, and they don’t know who you are. Those words were embedded in the back of my mind and have stayed with me.

The first day of third grade, after I asked my mom what was wrong with me, I met Mr. Rosenbaum. Walking into his room, I unconsciously rubbed the bald spot on my eyebrow and looked down at the ground. Unlike when I was a little kid, I was now afraid of adults; in school they made me feel ashamed of myself. Mr. R came right up to me before any of the other kids. When I walked into his classroom, he asked me what I liked to do. I didn’t know what this man wanted, so hesitantly I told him: I like to play soccer. I am really fuc . . . , I am really good.

He laughed. He had already met my mom and was familiar with my family’s profound way with words. I know. Your mom told me you were. They are really proud of you.

Yeah. Well, my brother comes up from school, from San Diego, to watch me play and my sisters scream on the sideline, ‘Kill them, get the fuc . . . , ah, get the ball.’ My brother says I can be a professional, and my dad’s my coach. He tells me I do a good job. Can I bring my ball to class?

I don’t see why not. You just have to let me kick too.

I play all the time, on my own. No one tells me to. I work really hard, I do. I work really hard, Mr. R.

Your mom said you don’t like to spell.

Fuck spelling . . . I’m sorry, I said with my head down.

Let’s not worry about spelling. Who needs it anyway? What else do you like to do?

I couldn’t believe he had said that. I felt lighter for a second, and I smiled. I like to build things, and I like stories. I like to read them, to look at the pictures, and I like to make them up. I like that a lot.

He looked at me and said, Well, if that’s what you like, let’s do it. The soccer part you’ll take care of; the building and the stories, I got. Sound good?

Throughout third and fourth grade, Mr. R kept his promise to me. He created an environment where I could be successful, and he did not make me feel ashamed of my struggles and weaknesses. His classroom was project oriented, and I thrived in social studies and science. For one project I invented a running shoe with springs in it, which got the